Zoombinis is a game so enchanting, unique, and bizarrely ahead of its time that no game has since come close to replicating it. The more you play, the more complex the puzzles become, and for an excellent reason: to usher all 625 Zoombinis to Zoombiniville, one must run through 40 perfect games. Each time you reach Zoombiniville with a new herd, the game constructs a building they require to prosper on their unfamiliar territory - a library, a general store, a bowling alley, or a paperclip museum, to name a few. With its four levels of difficulty, the game is undeniably pretty damn complicated (co-creators Scot Osterweil and Chris Hancock set the age range for play from ages 8 to 100). Second, you must steer your flock through nine of 12 puzzles and through four increasingly seedy areas with names like “The Mountains of Despair,” and “Deep, Dark Forest.” Third, there are no directions. There are three stipulations to the original game: First, you can only bring 16 Zoombinis at a time, tweaking them with five available traits and four attributes, before you set sail (it's possible to literally create 625 completely individual Zoombinis). At this stage, it's your duty as the player to shepherd the miniature blue refugees to freedom - a charming place called Zoombiniville where the Zoombinis are free to rebuild their formerly utopian commune. Instead, the Bloats cancel holidays, steal profits, and increase the Zoombinis' workload, compelling them to take matters into their own hands (or lack thereof) and get the hell out of Dodge.

The Bloats - another word for 'suits,' if you will - overrun the isle after promising to advance the Zoombinis' lives through modernization of their manufacturing processes. But the Zoombinis' harmonious existence is promptly disrupted, and they flee their native soil in a storyline I've since learned has purposefully heavy Socialist undertones. The game begins on Zoombini Isle, where 625 Zoombinis live in peace producing 'small useful things that were prized the world over,' such as paper clips and those strange hard bindings at the tips of shoelaces ( ed’s note: they’re called “aglets”). And unlike those exhaustively annoying memes, it kind of is something only '90s kids will remember. If any of these descriptors jog your memory, you might have played Brøderbund's bestselling educational-veiled-as-pure-adventure computer program The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis as a child. And sixteen azure beans with sunglasses, roller skates, springs for legs, and nearly blue-black hair. A technicolor wall of mud a stone lion with a magic paw an impatient Cajun ferryboat captain. Three slick-talking tree stumps with a virtually indomitable appetite for pizza. An anthropomorphic cliffside in dire need of some Zyrtec.

Zoombinis game online